March 28, 1970: East-West Major League Baseball Classic honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a conclave of civil rights advocates arrived at Memphis Municipal Airport on the morning of April 3, 1968. Dr. King’s group made the trip to show solidarity with the city’s 1,300 striking Black sanitation workers.1

Later that day Dr. King gave his iconic “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple. The next evening Dr. King was felled by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The repercussions of this horrific act sent shock waves throughout the nation. President Lyndon Johnson declared April 7, 1968, a National Day of Mourning while many events around the country were canceled or postponed.2

From its earliest days, baseball has served the American people in their times of need. From benefit games for bereaved families to operating during World War II when fascism threatened the world, the sport has stood tall. Its cathartic nature was never more evident than in the inspirational games played in New York after the 9/11 attacks.

The start of the 1968 baseball season was just days away when Dr. King was assassinated. The opening games were postponed after Pittsburgh Pirates players Roberto Clemente and Dave Wickersham informed general manager Joe L. Brown that they would not play on April 8 or April 9, the latter being the day of Dr. King’s funeral. In a statement on behalf of the Pittsburgh players, they said: “We are doing this because we white and black players respect what Dr. King has done for mankind.”3 In St. Louis, Bob Gibson and Orlando Cepeda conveyed similar sentiments to the Cardinals’ front office.

Soon after, Commissioner William Eckert pushed all of the games back to April 10. Even with this show of solidarity from the major leagues, the players wanted to do more to honor the revered civil rights leader. This included contacting Joseph Peters, who had recently been named sports project director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The players’ goal was to put on a benefit baseball game in Dr. King’s honor. Possibility became reality when Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley offered the use of his ballpark. The initial plan was to hold the MLK tribute game there in March of 1969, but the time frame was not conducive to the massive amount of logistics involved with coordinating this type of event.

With the advantages of another year of planning, the game was scheduled for March 28, 1970, at Dodger Stadium. The teams were designated as the East and West All-Stars. Each major-league franchise provided two players for the game. The rosters were assembled geographically from the six-team divisions that baseball had instituted the previous season, not by their specific leagues.

The players were picked by the Southern California Sportscasters’ Association and the Los Angeles-Anaheim Chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Joe DiMaggio was named manager of the East All-Stars. He had recently resigned from his dual positions of coach and executive vice president for the Oakland A’s. DiMaggio’s coaching staff included Satchel Paige, Stan Musial, John McNamara, and Billy Martin.

Former Brooklyn Dodger Roy Campanella was the skipper for the West squad. It was the first time he had been to Los Angeles since his benefit game at the Coliseum in 1959.  Campanella’s well-respected coaches were Elston Howard, Sandy Koufax, Don Newcombe, and Don Drysdale.4

DiMaggio and Campanella drew on star-studded rosters. As of 2024, 16 players on the two teams – Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Johnny Bench, Lou Brock, Reggie Jackson, Al Kaline, Willie Mays, Joe Morgan, Tony Oliva, Frank Robinson, Ron Santo, Tom Seaver, Willie Stargell, Cepeda, Clemente, and Gibson – had been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The funds that were raised from the game were earmarked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and for the establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center in Atlanta. The night before the game, comedian Bill Cosby hosted a dinner party at Warner Brothers Studios. The attendees included Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, and the ballplayers and their guests.     

The next day, 31,694 fans passed through the turnstiles at Dodger Stadium.5 In addition to the pregame presentations, excerpts of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech were broadcast over the PA system. Jackie Robinson, a civil rights activist and a close friend of Dr. King, was in the stands.6 A number of entertainment figures were also there, including Sammy Davis Jr., Danny Kaye, Anthony Quinn, and Greg Morris.

With a little over a week left until Opening Day and most teams in spring training in Florida or Arizona, many of the players had come long distances to commemorate Dr. King. Mays had left the San Francisco Giants in the midst of their goodwill tour of Japan, traveling 12,000 miles round trip to play in the game. Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, a reporter asked him about the long trek. “Too important to pass up,” Mays responded. He added, “At last baseball players can show their feelings about the late Dr. King, and his work, through the medium of this game.”7

Seaver, the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner, was the East’s starting pitcher. He was asked about flying to California while the New York Mets, coming off an improbable World Series championship, were training in Florida. Seaver responded, “If Dr. King could give his life for a cause he believed in, the least I could do was to give one day for it.8

When Boston Red Sox first baseman Ken Harrelson broke his leg nine days before the game, the Mets’ Donn Clendenon, a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta and a close friend of Dr. King’s, volunteered to take his place. Clendenon, the MVP of the 1969 World Series, said he would get to the game by any means possible, “even if I have to hitchhike.”9

Coretta Scott King threw out the ceremonial first pitch to Bench, who was catching for the West. The pregame observances concluded with veteran pitcher Mudcat Grant’s rendition of the national anthem. Emmett Ashford – the first Black umpire in American or National League history – was behind the plate.10

Seaver tossed three scoreless frames to start the game. Houston Astros right-hander Don Wilson shut out the East for the first two innings before Lew Krausse replaced him in the third. Krausse had been traded from Oakland to the Seattle Pilots during the 1969-70 offseason.11 Former Dodger Ron Fairly, now with the one-season-old Montreal Expos, blasted Krausse’s first pitch over the right-field wall, just inside the foul pole, giving the East a 1-0 lead. In the second inning Ron Santo planted one of Krausse’s offerings into the left-field stands, making the score 2-0.

Gibson followed Seaver and put up three more goose eggs. The East team plated three additional runs in the eighth inning off Mudcat Grant. Kaline started the rally with an infield hit. After an out by Tommie Agee, consecutive doubles by Brock and Clemente followed by Ken McMullen’s single wrapped up the scoring for DiMaggio’s squad.

The West scored its only run in the bottom of the eighth. Willie Davis, about to begin his 11th season with the Dodgers, singled off Phillies lefty Grant Jackson. Davis took second on a long fly to left by Aaron before racing home on Ken Berry’s pinch-hit double to center.

The game ended with the East on top 5-1. McMullen and Santo each had two hits for the winners. Sal Bando collected a pair of singles for the West in the loss. 

The Coca-Cola Company awarded the “Player’s Player Award” to Fairly in recognition of his home run. Coretta Scott King made the presentation to Fairly during a postgame ceremony. In addition, each player received a bronze medallion emblazoned with Dr. King’s image. The personalized inscription inside the box read, “For Your Participation in the Cause of Human Dignity.” The medals were sanctioned by SCLC president Ralph Abernathy and sponsored by Coca-Cola.   

The proceeds from the game netted $30,000 for the SCLC and the King Memorial Center/Library.12

After the game, Campanella told the press, “It was a heckuva day. Although we couldn’t score many runs. It was a beautiful day.”13 The two managers received Lucien Piccard watches courtesy of American Airlines, engraved with the same phrase as the King medals.14

Bowie Kuhn had replaced Eckert as commissioner in 1969. An excerpt from his statement read, “I take this opportunity to commend the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for organizing this Classic and to thank the players for their participation, entirely voluntary, to this cause.”

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bill Marston and copy-edited by Len Levin. I would like to thank Alice Schock from the Art, Music, and Recreation Department of the Los Angeles Public Library for providing me with numerous articles on the game. I would also like to thank Kurt Blumenau, Gary Belleville, and John Fredland for their assistance with this article.

Photo credit: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, and the following:

Fletcher, Michael A. “When Baseball Organized an Early ‘All-Star’ Game to Remember Martin Luther King,” Andscape, January 15, 2018, https://andscape.com/features/mlb-baseball-organized-east-west-classic-1970-remembering-martin-luther-king-jr/.

Francis, Bill. “1970 Game Honored Legacy of Martin Luther King,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, https://baseballhall.org/discover/east-west-classic-1970. Accessed August 2024.

Lukas, Paul. “More on the 1970 East-West Baseball Classic,” UniWatch, March 29, 2021, https://uni-watch.com/2021/03/29/more-on-the-1970-east-west-baseball-classic/.

Markusen, Bruce. “MLK, Baseball Supported Each Other in Quest of Civil Rights,” National Baseball Hall of Fame. Accessed August 2024.

Steverson, Bryan. “Journey to Justice: The Converging Paths of Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Jackie Robinson: Perspectives on 42 (SABR, 2021), https://sabr.org/journal/article/journey-to-justice-the-converging-paths-of-jackie-robinson-and-dr-martin-luther-king-jr/.

Various issues of Jet magazine from 1970.

Notes

1 They were negotiating for a fair hourly wage and safer conditions after two employees were crushed to death in a refuse truck malfunction.  

2 Three days later Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law in honor of Dr. King.

3 Kevin Blackistone, “More Than a Ballplayer: After MLK Shooting, Roberto Clemente Halted MLB Opening Day 1968,” Washington Post, March 28, 2024. 

4 Pioneering Black players Joe Black and Larry Doby were at the ballpark in uniform that day but were not officially listed as coaches for either team.

5 Because of network scheduling issues, there was no live TV coverage. The game was rebroadcast the next day on KTLA in Los Angeles. 

 [6] In September of 1962, Robinson had spearheaded the fundraising drive to rebuild three Black churches that had been burned to the ground in Southwest Georgia. Robinson along with his wife and family, were also seated near Dr. King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in August of 1963.

7 Tom Verducci, “The Greatest (Forgotten) Game Ever Played: MLB’s 1970 Exhibition to Honor MLK,” Sports Illustrated.com, January 18, 2021, https://www.si.com/mlb/2021/01/18/martin-luther-king-day-baseball-hall-of-fame.

8 Dick Couch (Associated Press), “Baseball Stars Converge on Los Angeles for East-West Tilt,” Rushville (Indiana) Republican, March 28 1970: 3. 

9 “This Is Some Team!” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 26, 1970: B3.

10 The other umpires were Don Denkinger, Stan Landes, and Mel Steiner.

11 Three days after this game, on March 31, a federal bankruptcy referee approved the sale of the Pilots to a group of investors from Milwaukee. The Pilots were rebranded as the Milwaukee Brewers for the 1970 season.

12 $30,000 in 1970 is the equivalent of about $243,000 in 2024.

13 Charles Wells, “Game of Winners,” Los Angeles Citizen News, March 30, 1970: 13.

14 Representative John Tunney, “Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the Congress, Volume 116, Part 19, July 23, 1970, 25697.